Colossal Cave Adventure

This is the 350 point Crowther and Woods Colossal Cave Adventure game in 5 Fortran card decks, interpreted by JSL.

The pictures in this game are amazing; they form directly in your head.

I wrote the JSL interpreter for the source with one primary goal: don't modify the Fortran source. I'm pretty certain that's not a good approach; there is about as much JSL to process the Fortran as there is Fortran, and the result is fairly slow. But I think it is also faithful to the original. The JSL is highly tuned to this particular program and cannot possibly work with any other Fortran code. (Like the original, the first run is a bit slow while it builds an index. Subsequent runs use the saved index.)

I first encountered the game around 1978, so it is approximately 40 years old. (The JSL is about 10 years old; I probably can't tell you how it works anymore.)

You can find walk-throughs and maps on the Internet; I've never finished the game play.